If you won’t continually cultivate nourishing thoughts, feelings, and desires in your heart, deceitful and destructive ones will grow naturally. The thoughts, feelings, and desires that compel and control you are the ones you have cultivated within you. To keep your heart from wilting with worry cultivate it with hope!

A Christ-follower is a heart-cultivator improving the soil of his heart so it can grow and flourish with the fruit of God’s Spirit. Make your heart a greenhouse for God’s Spirit, not a warehouse of deception.

To cultivate continual awareness of the presence of the risen Christ requires much more than a daily dose of devotional literature. It’s an every moment thing. In a society filled with aggressive weeds it takes great courage to resist them and to cultivate God’s seeds in your heart.

The happiest people are cultivators who weed bad seeds from their heart and nurture it with Christ’s compassion, humility, and hope. To grow the fruit of God’s Spirit, cultivate your heart.

Cultivate your heart!
It’s time to start
To cultivate your heart.
Where it is closed
Let it be exposed.
Where it’s stoney
Remove all that’s phony.
Pull out all of your weeds
To make room for God’s seeds.
Life’s only real security
Is to cultivate
Christ’s purity
In your heart.

If you will persistently cultivate
God’s will within your heart
You will grow to celebrate
A harvest of the fruit
Of His presence.

The word “ekklesia” (translated as “church” in almost all English Bibles) is a political term. It was the proper name of the town meeting in ancient Greek cities where all citizens were considered equal, and anyone could speak out in the assembly. Jesus said that He would build His town meeting (ekklesia) on the rock of revelation (Spirit-given insight and awe) not on human organizational or theological understanding. Christ’s town meeting creates an environment of open, Spirit-led sharing (1 Corinthians 14:26) where Jesus can be the present, active, and hand-on Head personally directing His gathered body so it can literally demonstrate “the fullness of Him” and be His light in human societies. (Ephesians 1:23.)

When the light that shines in members of Christ’s body is dimmed by weeds of religious tradition, fleshly desires, deceitfulness, human insecurities, and other things, a nation grows dark. To reverse that trend requires Christ’s light bearers begin to cultivate in their own heart the ingredients listed in 2 Chronicles 7:14.

The essence of Christ’s ekklesia is to cultivate an environment where hearts are willing to be cultivated, exposed, and healed. To believe that your desires change reality Is a delusion. Wanting something doesn’t make it true and doesn’t make it right.